Expanding on the post that tumblr ate

[butterflydreaming]

Crack headcanon: Yuuko Ichihara and Clow Reed are alternate universe versions of each other.

Now I’ll back up and try to explain…

I was trying to figure out some ideas about souls and reincarnations, relating to worldbuilding regarding the folklore that faeries and vampires don’t have souls. Some concepts about reincarnation talk about having a soul, meaning your personality, the you of youness, and having a spirit. The spirit is what is reborn into a new life. Reincarnations share a spirit but each have their own soul.

Combined with some ideas about multiple dimensions and alternate versions, this led to my reincarnation theory for fiction. This is that the spirit exists across multiple dimensions, and alternate selves are connected to each other by their common spirit/life essence. Magic users gain power by collecting more of this spirit in the birth of their soul. I think I can explain this better by applying the idea to the CLAMPverses.

So, Clow Reed. He was born with a hefty helping of magic. Left as it was, he would have lived a pretty long life, anyway. But Clow learned how to travel the dimensional corridor (mentioned and shown in the first Cardcaptor Sakura movie) in the time of the Madoushi, which appears to be 16th century or earlier. (That’s where I’ve placed it in my Clow Reed timeline, anyway. Yes, I have a timeline. I have a problem, I know.) As Clow visited other dimensions, his soul was drawn to the other versions of himself by the connection of spirit. He met these other versions of himself and discovered that alternate selves can affect each other in a special way; when they die, they can give their share of spirit to an alternate. When an alternate acquires more of his spirit than he was meant to have in his own dimension, he becomes magically stronger and his life extends.

In my thinking, this can only happen when the spirit is willingly given. It can’t be stolen. Also, not all versions of a person are physically the same. Some reincarnation beliefs support a reincarnation being physically different from the previous life. I’ve applied that idea of reincarnation to the idea of alternate selves.

I hope I haven’t lost you, yet...

As Clow lives longer, he is more likely to come across alt. selves that are moribund. As time goes on, he has more opportunities to gain more raw magic and life in addition to becoming magically stronger.

In Tsubasa, CLAMP shows that alternate selves can have both great and small differences to their counterparts. Kamui is a vampire, for heaven’s sake! That’s different! There seems to be only one Sakura with a Star Wand, though Tsubasa’s Sakuras do show a kind of magic of their own.

However, we are told that there was only one Clow Reed. (Also, there are Kero-chan types in TRC and there is Yukito, but no big!Keroberos or Yue.) Clow Reed is as unlikely to be his real name as Yuuko Ichihara is Yuuko’s real name. She says, at the beginning of holic, that it is not her real name and advises against giving anyone your real name. If Clow and Yuuko were peers, I imagine that this would be shared thinking.

Yuuko is the Dimensional Witch. Traveling between dimensions is her power. She seems a bit more modern, younger, than Clow. I conjecture in “Maybe Sometime, Somewhere” that they met when she was young. I have continuation for that fic -- but it’ll be months, at least, before I clear the to-write enough to do anything with it -- where I reveal that Yuuko knows that she is from another dimension, and she found Clow by being drawn to him. They like each other and are friends, but Clow recognized early on that Yuuko and he share mutual spirit. That’s why they don’t become a couple. Yuuko discovers the that she and Clow are essentially the same person, even if they are physically different. I mean, imagine that. It would put a damper on romance, seeing the kind of person you became under different circumstances.

But I also think that Clow is a slut, so it comes up in (the rewrite of) “Clow Stories” that he and Yuuko did have a physical relationship at one point. It is never actually stated in CLAMP canon what kind of relationship Clow and Yuuko had. However, Yuuko calls him “creepy” and says other things that sound a lot like talking about an ex. I think that they were friends and had a unique understanding of each other.

Clow and Yuuko knew that some shit was going to go down in Yuuko’s future. Clow had strong visions of the future. In CCS manga, the pressure of being that magically powerful was the reason that Clow died and reincarnated as two. He puts Sakura through all her trials to make her strong enough to do what he could not, to split his magic in two so that his reincarnations wouldn’t have the same burden as he had.

They created the mokona and set up a thousand other things for “that day that would come.” All that is played out in holic and TRC. What Clow didn’t realize or know was that it was his wish, when Yuuko was dying, to see her open her eyes one more time that caused all the mess. By wishing that, because his power was so strong, he stopped Yuuko’s time. This trapped her in a dream world until the concluding events in TRC. Yuuko says (this is her take on things, mind) that Clow made himself die because he made that wish and saw that his magic was too strong.

CCS was about all kinds of love, and Clow is originally a CCS character, so why not have him love a friend so much that he makes a wish like that at her death? It seems like such a small, gentle wish. In contrast, Yue goes to pieces over Clow’s intention of death.

Tomoyo’s love for Sakura is such that she wishes Sakura’s happiness over her own. That is one kind of BFF love. Clow is not selfless like that. In fact, it often seems that if he hasn’t actually foreseen something in a vision that he doesn’t think about consequences. Like splitting himself but not succeeding in splitting his magic at the same time. (Headcanon again. The manga doesn’t have the “uh, something’s wrong” moment that I put in “IS,BW.”) Like Yue running out of magic and fading out of existence. If he expected Touya to hand over his magic, then he would have predicted TouyaxYuki, which he did not.

Clow said “there are no coincidences” and Yuuko believed in hitsuzen. It’s unlikely that Clow sought his death out of remorse for his wish. More likely, he knew that he had to die -- split himself into his two reincarnations -- as a catalyst for future events. Sakura had to create the Star staff to give it to Yuuko to give it to the TRC heroes… and so on.

BTW, as I understand it, that means that CCS Sakura gives up her staff down the line, possibly while still in middle school. I think maybe she doesn’t need it anymore to use the Sakura Cards.

Yuuko’s butterfly motif is because she is trapped in a dream. Butterflies are symbolic of dreams. There is a Clow Card, The Dream, that is depicted as a butterfly. Butterflies also relate to pairing relationships (associated with weddings).

Butterflies are symbols of the soul. Lafcadio Hern recorded a folktale about a man who falls asleep under a tree. His friends tell him after he wakes that they saw a butterfly near his mouth after he fell asleep, that came back just before he awoke. The man tells his friends that he lived a dream, where he married a princess and lived a whole life. They see an ant colony under the tree. The tale implies that his soul left and lived that life, in a kind of faerieland, while he slept.

This meaning for butterflies also comes up in Irish folklore.

It is shown in holic that “cho” in Japanese is a homophone for butterfly and for a measure of distance. In this, the butterfly is a symbol for a journey, travel. Traveling is what Yuuko does; she travels across dimensions on the Aurora Path.

Eriol’s guardians have butterfly wings. Of course, CCS came substantially before holic & TRC. While it makes pretty fanon to tie Team Eriol’s butterfly wings to Yuuko, I think what was happening there was that the butterfly is used as a symbol of rebirth, because Eriol is a reincarnation. Plus, butterfly wings make a visual contrast to Team Clow’s feather wings.